One of the main components of a cartoning machine is a cartoner assembly which contains several components that transport a supply of flat, folded cartons and then open them for product insertion. The folded cartons in a cartoner assembly are located on a guide conveyor that moves the cartons forward by means of a motorized belt. The motorized belt transports the folded cartons forward into a face plate. The face plate guides the folded cartons into a desired position for future transportation. In addition, the face plate will hold the folded cartons in this position until a grabbing device to transport the folded cartons reaches the face plate. Once the folded cartons are removed from the face plate with a grabbing device, the folded cartons are moved to a separate conveyor where they are opened for product insertion.
Many current face plate assemblies incorporate static face plates that are designed and constructed around a single specific box size. Each face plate has to be designed, built, assembled, and delivered before starting production. This is a problem because production for a company can be put on hold until the face plate for a specific box size is completed, thus last minute changes to a box size can cause lengthy delays.
Existing face plate assemblies are also extremely limited in the range of box sizes that can be fed into them. In addition, these types of face plates often only allow slight adjustments to obtain optimum feeding of the carton size that the face plates are designed around. This leads to the purchase of numerous face plates because most companies utilize more than one type of box for packaging their goods. The greater the variety of boxes a company uses, the more face plates are needed. For example, a company may have up to 200 face plates because of the variety of boxes that the company uses. In addition to the expense of purchasing many face plates, the face plates take up a significant amount of storage space, which can also be a problem. For example, an entire room of a factory could be dedicated solely to the storage of face plates. In addition, the stored face plates could suffer damage over time or even become outdated if the box size a particular face plate holds is modified or never used again. Further, if the cartoner machine is upgraded, it may be unable to utilize older face plates. Such situations would lead to a loss of the investment in a particular face plate or an entire series of face plates.
Current face plate designs can also lead to a loss of efficiency in that the retrieval and changing of face plates takes time to perform. Once a new box size is required on the cartoner system, a worker must remove the installed face plate from the carton delivery system. The worker then will have to relocate the removed face plate to a supply room, retrieve the necessary face plate for the new box size, and return to the cartoner assembly to install the new face plate. Only after the new face plate is installed can the cartoner assembly feed a new carton size into the carton delivery system.